Erosion on the Outer Banks: Nature’s Work, Not Climate Alarm
The Outer Banks are eroding, but the cause is overwhelmingly natural. Storms, subsidence, shifting sands, and Gulf Stream changes explain over 80 percent of shoreline retreat since 1975. Barrier islands are meant to move; overwash and inlet cuts are not signs of catastrophe but of nature at work. Only about 19 percent of the erosion aligns with an accelerated sea-level rise, itself a product of a warming trend whose causes remain disputed. The lesson is simple: erosion here is not proof of man-made crisis but of the timeless, restless forces that have always shaped barrier coasts.